At a gathering for her cousin’s wedding party, newly licensed PI Annie McIntyre gets asked an age-old question: What really makes us who we are, nature or nurture? Clint Marshall, an up-and-coming musician and an adoptee at a personal crossroads, wants to hire Annie to find his biological parents, and that question is on his mind. When Annie discovers that her client's father is a bank robber who her granddad, Leroy, arrested back when he was sheriff, reverberations sound between the past and the present, igniting old flames and rivalries. When the brother of her client dies suddenly, his death ruled a suicide, Annie questions whether or not it was in fact homicide --- and who in this family of outlaws would rather some secrets stay buried.

In shock and found clinging to a tree branch, Bethany Richter is pulled from thrashing floodwaters that have decimated the town of Garnett, Texas, and killed a dozen others. Six months after solving the murder of a local waitress, Annie McIntyre is working as an apprentice P.I. when she's handed her first solo case: uncover the identity of the man who rescued Bethany before he was swept downriver. When Annie's search turns up a different victim --- shot dead, not drowned --- Annie questions if the hero they seek is actually a killer. Flexing her new skills while relying on the wisdom of her eccentric ex-cop grandfather, the case leads Annie into a web of drug dealers, preachers and wayward drifters trying to make sense of life after a disaster.

Recently graduated from college and back home in Garnett, Texas, waitressing, lacking not in ambition but certainly in direction, Annie McIntyre is lured into the family business --- a private investigation firm --- by her supposed-to-be-retired grandfather, Leroy, despite the rest of the clan’s misgivings. When a waitress at the café goes missing, Annie and Leroy begin an investigation that leads them down rural routes and haunted byways, to noxious-smelling oil fields and to the glowing neon of local honky-tonks. As Annie works to uncover the truth, she finds herself identifying with the victim in increasing, unsettling ways, and realizes she must confront her own past if she wants to survive this homecoming.